Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic, is one among two recipients of this yr’s Susan C. Larsen Lifetime Achievement Award from the Rabkin Basis. Acknowledged as an arts author who has “had a generational impact on the field,” Vartanian and fellow recipient, feminist critic and curator Lucy Lippard, have every been offered with an unrestricted $50,000 money prize.
The inspiration, which started awarding prizes to visible arts writers in 2017, described Vartanian and Lippard as “two pathfinding writers who have shaped how we think about art and its social and political contexts.”
Vartanian’s award coincides with Hyperallergic‘s 15th year as an independent art publication. Co-founded in 2009 by Vartanian and his spouse, Publisher Veken Gueyikian, Hyperallergic has diverted the standard of arts journalism away from market-driven reporting in favor of platforming marginalized, diasporic, underrepresented, and disenfranchised perspectives championing equity, justice, and culturally informed criticism for a global audience.
Born to an Armenian family in Aleppo, Syria, and raised in Toronto, Canada, Vartanian received his master’s diploma in Artwork Historical past on the College of Toronto and labored in Beirut, Lebanon, earlier than shifting to New York Metropolis and embedding himself within the arts and writing scenes.
Hrag Vartanian, editor-in-chief and co-founder of Hyperallergic (photograph by Kevin J. Miyazaki)
Rabkin Basis’s present Govt Director and longtime journalist Mary Louise Schumacher famous in a press release that Vartanian is an “independent-minded writer who pursued ideas that were not always embraced by the wider art world.” The inspiration particularly highlighted his function compiling journalistic and research-based assets on the risk to Armenian cultural heritage within the now-forcibly dissolved area of Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh) in 2021, in addition to his mural for Gaza, “Forbidden Sign Protest” (2023), on the Residence gallery window entrance in Manhattan’s Chinatown in late October 2023.
The inspiration additionally underscored the function of the Hyperallergic Podcast, hosted by Vartanian and that includes quite a few friends (together with Lippard herself), in increasing the horizons of arts journalism along with the publication, in addition to Vartanian’s curatorial endeavors embracing and exploring the intersection of recent media and digital community-building within the early 2010s.
Lucy Lippard at her dwelling in Galisteo, New Mexico (photograph by Kevin J. Miyazaki)
Along with her feminist advocacy within the arts, the muse acknowledged Lippard’s activism on the fronts of sophistication, gender, and racial fairness in cultural establishments, in addition to her organizing for arts and tradition staff in opposition to US intervention in Central America.
Lippard receives the Lifetime Achievement Award after having authored 30 books alongside innumerable evaluations, essays, and articles, and steered groundbreaking curatorial initiatives within the scapes of feminist, political, conceptual, and environmental artwork all through her profession. Rising into the scene throughout the Nineteen Sixties and juggling dozens of gallery and studio visits every week, Lippard made fairly the splash in 1971 because the curator of the landmark exhibition Twenty Six Modern Ladies Artists on the Aldrich Artwork Museum in Connecticut. The present’s affect continues to reverberate in curatorial and literary endeavors by as we speak, and a 2022 restaging on the establishment mirrored on the exhibition’s enduring affect on feminist artwork.
Lippard and Vartanian be a part of earlier Lifetime Achievement Award winners such because the New Yorker’s late artwork critic Peter Schjeldahl, Cristopher Knight of the Los Angeles Instances, former New York Instances critic Roberta Smith, and Maine-based artwork author and Hyperallergic contributor Carl Little.
“They are vanguards,” Schumacher stated of Lippard and Vartanian. “They have demonstrated to the field how central arts writing can be to our most critical, collective conversations and have both inspired a new generation of arts writers.”
